SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH IS awesome—we read it, we build upon it, we innovate with it, and we love it. But the process of getting research from the scientists who spend months or years with their data to the academics who want to read it can be messy. It takes a long time. It’s expensive. And the researchers involved give their work away for free—as do the peer-reviewers who approve it. Many researchers have long believed publishing power has evolved to lie in the hands of a few big companies, like, say, Reed-Elsevier and Springer. But none had ever done a study to see if that was true.” (via Wired)

“Every spring, Dean Jim Williams holds his breath and hopes that the University of Colorado will provide the Boulder campus libraries with an “inflation fighter,” or a budget increase to offset the dramatic cost increases for academic journals and other subscription-based publications. This year is no different. As the Boulder campus prepares to make its budget recommendation to the Board of Regents this week, Williams and other library administrators will be waiting to see how many journal subscriptions they’ll need to cut next year—even with a funding increase.” (via Colorado Daily)

“From the time he was 10 a century and a half ago, William Brewster searched the woods and fields of New England for birds, eventually becoming a noted ornithologist and spending half his life curating the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology’s bird collection. In addition to his passion for fieldwork, Brewster was a diligent note-taker. When he died in 1919, he left behind a collection of 40,000 birds, nests, and eggs, but also thousands of pages of diaries and journals that provide valuable insights on both the birdlife of his era and, through his writing on other subjects, the times themselves. At least, they would if people could read them.” (via Harvard Gazette)

Comments Off on Crowdsourcing old journals

December 8, 2014Comments Off on Crowdsourcing old journalsHarvard, Journals

“The Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters, the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals, today announced the release of the 2013 edition of its Journal Citation Reports® (JCR), the world’s most influential resource for evaluating peer-reviewed publications and the source of the annual Journal Impact Factors.” (via Thomson Reuters)

“Internet Archive announces today the addition of over 450,000 journal articles from the JSTOR Early Journal Content collection. Early Journal Content is a selection of pre-1923 materials from more than 350 journals and includes articles in the arts and humanities, economics and politics, and mathematics and other sciences. This content was digitized by JSTOR and is freely available through jstor.org, and it can now also be accessed and downloaded via archive.org.” (via Internet Archive Blog)

“The editor and the entire editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration have resigned in response to a conflict with the journal’s publisher over an author agreement that they say is “too restrictive and out of step with the expectations of authors.” The licensing terms set by the publisher, Taylor & Francis Group, were scaring away potential authors, the editor who resigned, Damon Jaggars, told The Chronicle.” (via The Chronicle of Higher Education)

“Scholars up to the age of 35 used to dominate authorship of articles in top economics journals. But a new study finds that the profession — at least as judged by publication — has aged dramatically since the 1960s. And the study also found that while women have made notable gains in top economics journals, those gains lag their growing representation in the discipline.”

“What if the only measurement of energy costs you followed was the price of oil, while everyone was shifting to cheaper and more efficient alternatives? And what if you completely ignored the fact that everything around you was using more and more power — your lights, your phone, your car, your heat, your media center? You might come to believe that energy is getting more expensive, when actually, it’s price is rising relatively slowly while your usage is what is skyrocketing. The same thing might be happening with print journal prices and digital journal licenses.

“In addition to using scholarly journals for active research projects, business faculty rely on materials that share insights and ideas ahead of publication, according to a new study from ProQuest that explores non-journal resources. Business faculty members are using working papers, printed books, pre-prints, conference proceedings and dissertations to explore specific research topics. When asked about passive forms of research — such as staying up-to-date in the field or identifying ideas for further research — newspapers join books at the top of most-used resources.”